At Last the Forgetting, or Look Mother Margaret it’s New Orleans Again!
Apr. 4, 20141 viewer
At Last the Forgetting, or Look Mother Margaret it’s New Orleans Again! Lyrics
When I look for you in time
I condense all I know into a day
When I forget of April 14th
I forget of history, New Orleans, orphans and you
I forget all life happens on a sinking ship
I saw Mr. Lincoln going down
Inside the Titanic’s theater
And Mr. Booth is already on deck
Fighting The Yemassee War near the bow
Scenes of colonial enslavement &
Iceberg slaughter on the high seas
The steerage class flees to the outnumbered rafts
Like Apalachee refugees to St. Augustine’s knees
You and Noah Webster consult two Benjamins
Before adding ‘abolition’ to his new word book schemes
Early in the morning I see Stout Marshall Stoudenmire
Pull twin Colt Revolvers from his sides, gun down
Four vaqueros’s dreams aboard space shuttle Columbia (OV-102)
Having just returned to El Paso after its 37th orbit
When I look for you, Mother Margaret, it seems
Horus as the first orphan, raised by sister’s womb-stream
A Sycamore Tree named Isis, You, the three killings of Osiris
The bastard pharaoh of our dead brother Set rings
On April 14th I only see through The Eye of Horus:
For us I forget the 105th day in a leap year
I forget The Donner Party is just leaving Springfield
I forget ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad’ plays on the Zenith Short Wave
I forget I sing along in the middle of that Black Sunday Storm
I forget on April 14th, 1882, months before you died, you gave birth
I forget the boy’s name is Moritz Schlick: “Cat-gut Cord” Aran’s line!
& I forget Lebensweisheit is your posthumous eulogy
I forget that day in 1860, I carried news west for The Pony Express
The St. Joseph’s Gazette carried news of birth in Butcher’s Hollow
The Coal Miner’s Daughter turned 3 and gave her Bible to Von Daniken
I forget in ’41 that Peter Rose was born an orphan with King Leopold…
And they don’t allow orphans in the halls of Cooperstown or the Congo
So I forget you nurture Zamenhoff’s child-language after death
I forget the Allied Forces land in Normandy
I forget Robert E. Lee resigns from the Union Army
I forget Pocahontas marries John Rolfe, plays hungry games with us
I forget Ms. Tubman starts an Underground Railroad
I forget Mr. Koresh finishes the Bhagavad Gita & agrees to surrender
I forget and I forget and I forget, I forget I see it all, so stop:
It’s April 14th and I love you best in New Orleans
I condense all I know into a day
When I forget of April 14th
I forget of history, New Orleans, orphans and you
I forget all life happens on a sinking ship
I saw Mr. Lincoln going down
Inside the Titanic’s theater
And Mr. Booth is already on deck
Fighting The Yemassee War near the bow
Scenes of colonial enslavement &
Iceberg slaughter on the high seas
The steerage class flees to the outnumbered rafts
Like Apalachee refugees to St. Augustine’s knees
You and Noah Webster consult two Benjamins
Before adding ‘abolition’ to his new word book schemes
Early in the morning I see Stout Marshall Stoudenmire
Pull twin Colt Revolvers from his sides, gun down
Four vaqueros’s dreams aboard space shuttle Columbia (OV-102)
Having just returned to El Paso after its 37th orbit
When I look for you, Mother Margaret, it seems
Horus as the first orphan, raised by sister’s womb-stream
A Sycamore Tree named Isis, You, the three killings of Osiris
The bastard pharaoh of our dead brother Set rings
On April 14th I only see through The Eye of Horus:
For us I forget the 105th day in a leap year
I forget The Donner Party is just leaving Springfield
I forget ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad’ plays on the Zenith Short Wave
I forget I sing along in the middle of that Black Sunday Storm
I forget on April 14th, 1882, months before you died, you gave birth
I forget the boy’s name is Moritz Schlick: “Cat-gut Cord” Aran’s line!
& I forget Lebensweisheit is your posthumous eulogy
I forget that day in 1860, I carried news west for The Pony Express
The St. Joseph’s Gazette carried news of birth in Butcher’s Hollow
The Coal Miner’s Daughter turned 3 and gave her Bible to Von Daniken
I forget in ’41 that Peter Rose was born an orphan with King Leopold…
And they don’t allow orphans in the halls of Cooperstown or the Congo
So I forget you nurture Zamenhoff’s child-language after death
I forget the Allied Forces land in Normandy
I forget Robert E. Lee resigns from the Union Army
I forget Pocahontas marries John Rolfe, plays hungry games with us
I forget Ms. Tubman starts an Underground Railroad
I forget Mr. Koresh finishes the Bhagavad Gita & agrees to surrender
I forget and I forget and I forget, I forget I see it all, so stop:
It’s April 14th and I love you best in New Orleans
About
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Genius Annotation
The idea behind this poem was prompted by one question: what if we could condense all of time and space into one place at one time? Everything happens everywhere all at once.
I used a significant date in my life, April 14th, and researched a variety of historically significant events that happened on April 14th. I used references to these events as the basis for a hallucinatory poem that uses the historic allusion as the primary organizing literary device.
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